I think it's also worth pointing out, wrt to the Hardison situation, that the issue ISN'T exclusively Oblivious Racist Bias. The issue is, they were attempting to CORRECT a racist trope, by making Hardison the most well-adjusted, not giving him a violent or traumatizing backstory. "We have a black man on our crew and he's the smartest, kindest, most mentally sound member" is actually groundbreaking. Problem is, the way they wrote the show, they didn't know what to DO with him, and didn't devote enough attention to filling in that blank space with other stuff. The attempt at correcting the tropes accidentally resulted in him being sidelined wrt development and backstory, so they swapped Overtly Terrible Racism for a more subtle form. They were actively trying NOT to be racist and missed that their solution was racist in a different way. They're not bad people for that, they just needed to be more aware. Hopefully the new show corrects this, now that we're in a more mindful era.
Yeah, they intentionally avoided several racist tropes and pitfalls, but then had their own biases and subtler racism showing up in there. Like I said before, they were trying for sure! But what they wrote in there, unintentional though it may be, is still in there and we shouldn't ignore that.
Either I'm all metaed out today or you said it beautifully, but I don't have much to add here that isn't restating your point. I guess just that...
Well, they put him in a good place to start with and then just, sounds like, didn't put as much effort into where to go from there as they should've. Things like saying "he doesn't have a tragic backstory and we aren't writing backstory for backstory's sake so we just won't go into his past at all" is just very limited thinking. It kind of implies that they felt they'd made their point and didn't have to put effort into thinking about how to develop this character further. Even if that's not what they mean, it still kinda feels that way. For example during these conversations over the past day or so I've seen/thought of several ways we could have been given backstory that informed Hardison's character and helped him grow.
So, yeah, I'm not trying to just constantly dunk on the writers and call them bad people. I just hope they do better in the future.
